A wrongful-death suit filed in Florida in October 2024 by the mother of a fourteen-year-old who died by suicide after months of conversations with Character.AI chatbots, naming the company and Google. In May 2025 the judge declined to dismiss the case on First Amendment grounds, declining to treat chatbot output as protected speech at that stage. In January 2026 the parties were reported to have agreed to settle.
Seen in May 2025 in reports of the ruling, which noted the judge was 'not prepared' to hold that words assembled by a language model were speech under the First Amendment, a sentence quoted by lawyers on every side.
The complaint alleged the product was designed to be addictive and lacked safeguards for minors; the company announced new safety features the day the suit was filed and later barred under-18s from open-ended chat. The court's May 2025 order let the product liability claims proceed.
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